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Republican congressional candidate Steve Stivers signed his name to a campaign advertisement this week, declaring of his opponent in Ohio’s 15th District that “Mary Jo Kilroy can’t hide from her 98.4% voting record with Nancy Pelosi.”

I’ll come right to the point. This claim by Steve Stivers is a lie.

A review of roll call data for the 111th Congress of 2009-2010 (the only term of Congress Mary Jo Kilroy has had in office) shows that this claim cannot be true. The current set of roll call votes for Rep. Kilroy’s term in office to date (database | codebook) flatly contradicts Steve Stivers’ claims.

The roll call record actually shows that Mary Jo Kilroy can’t possibly have voted with Nancy Pelosi 98.4% of the time, because Nancy Pelosi has only cast 88 out of 1,511 possible votes. This is because in her role as Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi does not actually cast votes unless a bill has a particularly high profile or the vote tally is especially close. Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, on the other hand, has cast 1,482 out of 1,511 votes, setting one of the best attendance records for the 111th Congress. Mathematically speaking, Mary Jo Kilroy can’t possibly have voted with Nancy Pelosi any more than 5.9% (88/1482) of the time.

In his desire to capture Ohio’s 15th District congressional seat, does Steve Stivers not care about getting caught in a lie? Or is his opinion of the 15th District so low that he thinks no one will bother to check?

About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

Assuming that Ms Kilroy voted on all 88 measures when Nancy Pelosi voted, then their percentage voting the same as each other could still not be 98.4%. If they voted the same on 87 of the 88 the percentage would be 98.9%. If they voted the same on 86 of the 88 the percentage would be 97.7%

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.